Q&A with Nicholas Adams

I spoke with a screenwriter on the hit Amazon show "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power."

One of the more exciting shows on TV last year was Amazon’s big-budget fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. With its exploration of themes of redemption, morality and corruption, and sifting through darkness to find the light, I found it to be quietly one of the most LDS shows perhaps ever put to the screen– though today’s guest, screenwriter Nicholas Adams, might disagree. (More on that below!) After graduating from BYU and moving to Los Angeles, Nicholas worked as a writers assistant on Rings of Power before becoming a full staff writer in Season 2. He wrote several acclaimed episodes of the show, and we spoke about his influences, his time in the writers room, and his favorite character to write for on Rings of Power.

When did you know you wanted to be a screenwriter?

I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I was very, very young. Maybe age 12? I was a big book reader. A lot of people come into screenwriting via the screen, I came into screenwriting via the writing. I was a writer first who kind of realized that screenwriting was going to lend itself best to my style of writing, my personality, and my perspective. I always wanted to write, and when I was little I always thought I'd write novels. But then every attempt I made through my adolescence to actually try to sit down and write a novel, I really, really struggled. I came to find out I had ADHD, and was not able to actually sit and write for very long at all. Getting through a novel is a very daunting undertaking for anyone. But when you have ADHD and when you're highly social like me, I found it was very, very difficult. But then when I discovered screenwriting in college, I started working on writing short films and things like that. It was just so much better for my own personality.

Also, film is such a collaborative medium—I can't think of a more collaborative art form in the world. I find myself thriving creatively when I'm being social, when I'm bouncing ideas off of other people, and when I'm having a creative process with someone else. Even if it's something that I'm only writing by myself, I feel like I sometimes will get stuck in a rut creatively unless I have people to bounce ideas off of. When you're writing a screenplay, you'll have producers, you'll have executives, people who are very invested in bouncing ideas off of you. Whether or not the notes are any good, they're very invested in trying to make it better and it becomes a more social kind of creative experience.

Nicholas began his career as a writers assistant and later earned his first writing credit on the show “Rings of Power,” which won critical acclaim for its lavish sets, costumes, and cinematography.

Tell me a little about you. How did you begin your early career?

When I was at BYU, there were a lot of people—professionals working in the industry—who would come out to BYU and do little seminars; they would come out from the industry to meet with us and do conferences and workshops with us. And every single one of them would say, “Well, you gotta move to LA.” And I felt like I saw a lot of BYU alums who were totally planning to move out to LA. But then they'd graduate and one thing would lead to another, and they just would never leave. And that works really well if you work in production because there's a lot of great production work in Utah, but there's less writing, a lot less. And so I thought, if I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to have to go out to LA. And I was very worried about becoming someone who never left. And so as soon as I graduated, I got rid of my apartment, and the day after my graduation ceremony, I just packed up my tiny little Toyota Corolla and just drove out to LA. And I did not have a place to stay. I didn't have a job. I knew a few people, not many. And I just kind of made it work; I found a job, I found a place to stay. I think it would have been much, much harder to do all of that if it hadn't been for the church. Being able to instantly make a group of friends; within one week I had a circle of friends through the singles ward. I can't imagine how people move to a new city without having that kind of infrastructure already built in. And eventually I got my first assistant job. Everything good that happened to me when I moved out to LA came through that singles ward.

That’s quite the ward! How did your path lead you to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power?

I could sum up the entire process with one word—or one name, anyway. That would be JD Payne. JD was the first counselor in the bishopric of the singles ward for a long time and we served together. I was the ward executive secretary, and he was in the bishopric, and we both bonded over our shared interests. We both had the same career as screenwriters (at least he had a career. I was aspiring to a career.) And we both loved classic cinema, especially classic Italian cinema. And so when we first met, we started doing a film club. Every single week for years and years, we would watch black and white movies, classic Italian films, Fellini, Kubrick, and then we'd have a big discussion about the film afterwards. And then at a certain point, while I was getting my master's degree at Loyola Marymount University, he reached out to me and said, “Hey, my screenwriting career is going pretty good. I'm getting to the point now where I could actually use a personal assistant.” And so for a number of years, I was his personal assistant. It was a lot of setting calls and setting meetings, taking notes and proofreading his scripts, which honestly was the coolest thing ever. I was getting to sit in on meetings literally with J.J. Abrams! I would just be in the room taking notes. It was like grad school going on alongside my grad school, where I was getting a complete deluge of learning about screenwriting and about what it looks like at a professional level because I was just kind of living in his shadow for a long time. And then when JD became a showrunner of Rings of Power, he just promoted me from personal assistant to his writers assistant and showrunners assistant.

Nicholas and his wife Heather at the “Rings of Power” Season 1 premiere.

So he and his writing partner, Patrick McKay, would sometimes give me opportunities to write some scenes or to write an outline of a script that they were working on. They were like, “Hey, we did a pitch. We now have to write an outline; will you write the first draft?” And I'd write the first draft, and then they would come in and just completely rewrite everything but would keep one or two sentences. Or I would add a couple of scenes and they'd ditch a lot of those scenes that I added, but they might keep one. And so I was starting to see already what things were working, what things weren't. So not a lot of my stuff that I wrote made it to their final draft, but by letting me do the outline and then rewriting, I could kind of learn the process. And they were giving me notes on scripts, and it was such a cool process. They were so charitable and awesome about giving me opportunities to write and to learn and to grow in that environment, and then when they became showrunners, they kind of just let me tag along.

You wrote the episodes Udûn in Season 1 and Halls of Stone in Season 2, considered by some (on Reddit at least) to be the strongest of the series. Tell me about crafting these episodes and your writing approach.

I feel like every time someone says that, I want to respond, “Yeah, luck is really great, isn't it?” I feel like I can't take any credit for it. In season one, JD and Patrick wanted to write episode six, because they knew how good it was going to be. They wanted to write Udûn because they knew it was going to be an awesome episode; that wasn't a surprise. But then when things became really crazy busy (as they tend to do when you're a showrunner), they said, “Oh my gosh, Nicholas, he's written outlines for us before. He's worked with us before. We know him. He'll just write the first draft and it'll be great.” And that was when the conversation became, “Well, if you're gonna have him do all that work, maybe keep some of the stuff that he's writing. And if you're going to involve him in this way, you know, you might as well share credit with him.” And that's pretty much what happened. They decided to share the credit with me, which was very generous; they didn't have to do that. Because honestly, it's such a collaborative process. At the end of the day, anyone who's written on a show like this or a big feature theatrical film with lots of writers—trying to parse out what DNA, what percentage of the DNA is yours, is kind of fruitless. So I don't know how much of my DNA is in episode six, but I'm sure some of it is, and I'm just really grateful that they ended up deciding to share credit with me.

In the Season 1 episode “Udûn,” a seeming victory against the forces of evil takes a sudden twist when a supervolcano erupts and turns the fertile Southlands into the ashen wasteland of Mordor.

Whereas in season two, that one was a big big deal because that was the episode where they told me, “We're going to have you do all of it.” So I wrote the outline, wrote the first round, wrote the second draft. And then of course, they come in and then they have to make changes. And then a ton of things change in production, as you know. And so in a lot of ways, there's a lot of scenes in that episode that weren't even in my original episode. They were actually in Glenise Mullin’s episode, and a lot of our stuff got swapped between episodes as they were editing things in the process of cutting between multiple storylines. So at the end of the day, I think I was just very lucky that I got a lot of really great scenes in my episode and that the guys assigned me to it. I thought it had some really, really cool character scenes, you know.

And I think you're being much too modest. Some of the people who read this newsletter are probably not familiar with the way that TV writing works. Can you walk us through what the Rings of Power writers room was like?

Yeah, so it was really great for me during season one where I wasn't a staff writer yet, I was just the writers assistant. I was promoted to staff writer for season two. So it was my job to sit in the meetings of the writers room and just take notes—not like a stenographer, but making sure we had the basic outline, the basic gist of everyone's different pitches and the direction of the conversation. So in case [the showrunners] would say, “Wait, there was a really good pitch yesterday. What was it?” Or if they wanted to look back and go over, “We had three different ideas of how this guy could be murdered. What were some of the ideas that we had again?” So that was my role as a writers assistant, basically taking notes on all of that. And that is a really awesome kind of opportunity to learn and grow for people who become staff writers. And so I was able to see what kind of pitches work, and when it's appropriate to speak up, and when sometimes it's better off to just hold onto a pitch and not dive in with something. A lot of times the conversation has momentum, a sense of creative momentum. And it's very easy for one writer to come in and with an errant pitch and just kind of kill that momentum. And I was very hyper-aware of that.

Nicholas wrote the Season 2 episode “Halls of Stone.” In it the Elven smith Celebrimbor falls deeper into the deceptions of Sauron, who has manipulated him into creating flawed rings that augment the wearers’ darker impulses.

It’s a very collaborative process. JD and Patrick, the showrunners of Rings of Power, didn't come up in a very hierarchical, traditional TV-style room. They were much more collaborative for that reason and much, much more inclusive, I think, than traditional television often can be. And so the conversation was very collaborative, very much “let the best idea win” sort of thing. And when you're in that kind of setting where you're together, for several hours a day, bouncing ideas around, it becomes this thing where they’ll say, “That was a really good idea. Whose idea was that?” And there would be times I would go back in the record and I would look, and say, “Well, it was kind of no one's idea. It was kind of everyone's idea.”

Like, when one person was stuck on a problem and trying to do it themselves, it didn't work as well as when the whole group was collaborating and bouncing off ideas and things like that. And so I was able to see the kind of things that lead to better collaboration and the things that can hinder it. The best writer's rooms are ones where there's a really good spirit of collaboration.

Who is your favorite character in the show to write and why?

That would be Elendil. It's not very often in TV and cinema that you see someone struggling with religion and faith during a moment of crisis in a way that feels real to people’s lived experience, you know. I think he's someone who has kind of strayed from the faith of his childhood and is kind of finding himself, reconnecting with it, even as he's dealt with the loss of a son and his entire society getting upended in the midst of a sort of a coup, and as he’s going through these things it kind of leads him back to the faith of his ancestors. He's just a man who's trying his best to do the right thing at a time when doing the right thing is very, very unpopular. And Lloyd Owen, who plays Elendil, is such a likeable guy and very charming, and a lot like Elendil in those same ways as well. So I feel a certain fondness in writing that character, and a certain closeness to that story. It’s the most relatable of all the storylines, in my opinion.

Nicholas’ favorite character to write for on "Rings of Power” is Elendil, a noble but flawed father who wrestles with his faith while his country teeters on the edge of civil war.

I’ll just say it once and leave it here. Rings of Power, in terms of themes, language, ideas, and DNA, is probably the most Latter-day Saint show that has ever been written for the screen. Agree or disagree?

Oh boy, um, I disagree, but not because I can think of a better example. I think that there is definitely a lot of that same DNA in there, but in a way that I think only people who are connected to the Church will truly get. And I think people who are writers, who are LDS writers, will be able to see that LDS perspective. If there's a lot of that, most of it is very unintentional. I’m sure JD could comment on this better, but his culture is just a big part of it. It's part of his worldview and part of who he is. And I think that a lot of that comes out in the DNA of Rings of Power.